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Summer 2025 Western History Collections Fellows

Masterson Fellows

Headshot of Nanea Renteria
Nanea Renteria is a PhD Candidate in the Religion Department at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines the contributions of Indigenous women to the Native American Church, whose members utilize peyote as the central sacrament of their religious ceremonies. Using both archival and oral history methods, Nanea’s work attends to the ongoing ramifications of late 19th century frontier violence and subsequent assimilation policies on the religious lifeways of western Oklahoma tribes. Her dissertation, Peyote Women: Gender, Healing, and Power highlights the creativity, determination, and healing practices of Indigenous communities who, when faced with state repression, orient toward the sacred. 
Headshot of Keely Smith
Keely Smith is an assistant professor of Native American history in the Department of History and Native American and Indigenous Studies Program at Tulane University. She earned a PhD in history from Princeton University in 2024. Smith's book project, Communicating Sovereignty: A History of the Mvskoke Language, 1715-1890, uncovers the ways Mvskoke speakers used language to make and maintain sovereignty amidst their political coalescence in the eighteenth century and forced removal and community reestablishment in the nineteenth century. In addition to academic writing and teaching, Smith is dedicated to supporting language revitalization efforts of Native peoples from the Gulf South. 

Jack Haley Fellows

Headshot of Zane Brown
Zane Brown is a first-year PhD student in the history department at OU. He moved to Norman from Jonesboro, Arkansas, where he finished his MA at Arkansas State University. It was here that he found an interest in the history of the American West and Native America, and he had the privilege of consulting the WHC for source material while writing his thesis in 2022. His project this summer, Everywhere and Nowhere: A Study of Kiowa Expressive Culture in the Reservation Period, seeks to build on that project. It will analyze the role of Kiowa interpreters, consultants, and artists in shaping the documentary source material, and the history, of Southern Plains Indigenous societies in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. 
Headshot of Hope Cunningham

Hope Cunningham is a master’s student studying history at the University of Oklahoma. Her research focuses on the ways in which Oklahomans understood and expressed ideas of masculinity in reference to conscription and military service during the First World War. She is currently working on her master’s thesis, which will be entitled: “‘For Our Women, Children, and Country’: Masculinity and Conscription in World War I Era Oklahoma.” This will be the focus of her research during her Jack Haley Fellowship. 

Dale Society Fellow

headshot of Hannah Johnson
Hannah Johnson is a current Art History PhD student at the University of Oklahoma, studying twentieth-century American illustration and literature. She earned her MA in Art History from the University of Kansas. Her increasing interest in the diffusion and accessibility integral to printed media led her to OU’s Art History program. Her research focuses on depictions of women and children within literature and art examining themes of agency and autonomy within changing socio-political climates. The title of her project for the Dale Society Fellowship is “Spunk, Sass, and Ingenuity: Illustrating feminine self-efficacy and agency in Lois Lenski’s heroines.” 

Western History Collections Fellowships

Past Fellowship Recipients

Masterson Fellows

2024: Abby Gibson
2024: Emma Herman
2022: Randy Hopkins
2022: Noah Ramage
2022: Sophie Joscelyne

Jack Haley Fellows

2024: Tom Kahle
2024: Adam Kerjci 
2022: Martha Beliveau
2022: Sawyer Young
2022: Bryce Jones
2022: Brendan Thomas

Dale Society Fellows

2022: Cecilia Slane

 

For details about the various WHC fellowships please visit the WHC Fellow Page